Ninth Circuit Gets It Right: No Indian Religious Veto Meanwhile, in September 2002, to ensure its economic viability, Arizona Snowbowl proposed to make artificial snow with reclaimed water purchased from Flagstaff. When the Forest Service approved that proposal in June 2005, American Indian religious practitioners sued under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), enacted in 1993 to strengthen judicial review of government acts affecting religion. Although the Supreme Court ruled the RFRA unconstitutional as to States, it arguably remains applicable to federal actions. An Arizona federal district court rejected the claim; however, a Ninth Circuit panel held the plan tantamount to a government edict that Christian “baptisms be carried out with ‘reclaimed water.’” In December 2007, the Ninth Circuit reheard the case en banc. In August 2008, by 8-3, the Ninth Circuit, relying on the Supreme Court’s 1988 ruling, reversed the panel’s decision, rejected the RFRA claim, and held that "[G]iving one religious sect a veto over the use of public park land would deprive others of the right to use what is, by definition, land that belongs to everyone." Left undecided was an issue federal lawyers, for unknown reasons, had failed to raise: whether the RFRA applies at all to federal land....